The Blue Elephant is the closest you’ll get to true Thai

Restaurant review: The Blue Elephant is pretty much like being in Thailand. But in a way that nervous Western tourists see it, rather than the grittier reality.

New home: The Blue Elephant has moved from Fulham Broadway to impersonal Imperial Wharf

I used to adore the Fulham Broadway branch of Blue Elephant. But then I used to be a poverty-stricken aficionado of high camp. It was the buffet brunch: where else could you, for a fixed price, ingest Bunterish quantities of rather splendid Thai food in an environment that made Disney look like Strindberg?

Vast and chaotic, it rustled with tropical greenery and tiki-ish huts; a carp-filled stream snaked through the room. Now, after 25 years it has relocated to expensive, impersonal Imperial Wharf, to an equally vast space that used to be called Saran Rom – another spendy Thai where I had one of the worst evenings of my restaurant-going life. Google it if you fancy a gawp.

Saran Rom’s already extravagant, carved mahogany fittings have been layered with even more flamboyance. You walk through a bloom-laden lobby, plastered with Blue Elephant products, to a theme park of royal Thai-ness. In the downstairs bar – giant vats of frosty martini for a tenner; recommended – is a 9m golden dragon. If you’re the sort of person who likes to propose by a river view, with a diamond in a glass of fizz, this is right up your boulevard.

The new menu is more complex than it was in Fulham Broadway, with lots of pontificating about Thai Cooking of the Past, Thai Cuisine of Today and Thai Kitchen of Tomorrow. There’s an extensive vegetarian menu but no mention of whether or not it avoids fish sauce.

It’s big on decorative nonsense: carved vegetable flowers; pandanus leaves on puddings; elaborate crockery and cutlery. One starter – mieng kham – arrives in what looks like a jewellery box full of tiny cups and spoons; you fold betel leaves round quantities of toasted coconut, palm sugar sauce, shallots, scud chillies, dried shrimp, ginger and slivers of lime. It’s top fun: shame some of the aromatic leaves are browning at the edges.

Staff, in silky, self-conscious outfits, are a curious mixture of typically Thai over-solicitousness and sweet ineptitude: their knowledge about wine appears to be zilch. And they’re equally clueless about ingredients and techniques, as demonstrated when I ask how they turn catfish into what appears to be fish candyfloss for yum pla duk fu (catfish and green mango salad; and yes, I do know). They giggle charmingly – for this service they charge 12.5 per cent.

The dish is good though, a cloud of crunchy, fried fish fibres on shredded green mango with nice, sweet, tart, hot, caramelly dressing. Laab (aka laap or larb) ped – finely chopped duck salad – delivers a massive thwack of flavour from quantities of lime juice, Thai basil, nippy little pink shallots and threads of kaffir lime leaves. They’ve correctly included ground, toasted rice and snake beans – this is rare, even in good Thai restaurants – but I wish they’d either roasted off the clods of flabby duck fat or omitted it altogether.There’s a thick, oily Penang curry (‘red’ spices, peanuts and loads of coconut cream). ‘Drunken sizzling beef’ shows no evidence of either booze or sizzle and the meat is greyish and sinewy. With a royal ransom’s-worth of interior design, it seems reductive to skimp on ingredients. Maybe they figure we’ll be too dazzled by the surroundings to notice.

The Blue Elephant is, in fact, pretty much like being in Thailand. But in a way that nervous Western tourists see it, rather than the grittier reality. I was once trapped in the Four Seasons Bangkok while Red Shirts barricaded the streets and people were getting shot, unable to get home thanks to a pesky Icelandic volcano. We were the only people in the hotel but the string quartet played on. This oasis of manufactured exoticism reminds me of that.It’s way, way more expensive than a high street Thai. But with its genuinely Thai pedigree – chef and owner Khun Noroor Somany Steppe also runs cooking schools in Bangkok and Phuket, and she’s about to open one in this outpost’s upper floor – it’s a taste of the real-ish thing.

A meal for two with wine, water and service costs about £130.The Boulevard, Imperial Wharf, SW6. www.blueelephant.com